J.K. ROWLING AND THE PSEUDONYMOUS NOVEL

LONDON — "The Cuckoo's Calling," a debut detective novel published here in April, was not a huge commercial success, but it got great reviews.

Readers described it as complex, compelling and scintillating. They compared the author — a former military police investigator writing under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith — to P.D. James, Ruth

Rendell and Kate Atkinson. They said the book seemed almost too assured and sophisticated to be a first novel.

As it happens, they were right. In one of the great publishing coups in recent years, "The Cuckoo's Calling," which has sold just 1,500 copies in Britain so far, turns out to have been written not by an ex-British army officer, or by a new writer, or even by a man. Instead, its author is J.K. Rowling, whose Harry Potter novels have made her one of the world's best-selling, and best-known, authors.

Rowling was unmasked by The Sunday Times of London, which, acting on an anonymous tip, embarked on a sleuthing mission of its own and published the result Sunday. In the article, Rowling confessed to the ruse and spoke somewhat wistfully of her brief, happy foray into anonymous authorship.

"I had hoped to keep this secret a little longer, because being Robert Galbraith has been such a liberating experience," she said in a statement. "It has been wonderful to publish without hype or expectation, and pure pleasure to get feedback under a different name."

Nicky Stonehill, a publicist for the author, said Sunday that Galbraith and Rowling were indeed one and the same. "We can confirm it," she said, "but we are not making any further statement."